 | |
| Company type | Public (Aktiengesellschaft) |
|---|---|
| FWB: EXL | |
| Industry | Enterprise software &Database management &Data warehousing &OLAP |
| Founded | 2000 |
| Headquarters | Nuremberg, Germany |
| Products | In-memory database Exasol, ExaAppliance, ExaCloud |
| Website | www.exasol.com |
Exasol is an analytics engine, an in-memory database company headquartered in Germany, EU. It supports a wide range of use cases, from standalone data warehouse deployments to analytics acceleration and AI/ML model enablement. It's technology is based onin-memory,column-oriented,relational database management systems[1]
Since 2008, Exasol led theTransaction Processing Performance Council's TPC-H benchmark for analytical scenarios, in all data volume-based categories 100 GB, 300 GB, 1 TB, 3 TB, 10 TB, 30 TB and 100 TB.[2] Exasol holds the top position in absolute performance as well as price/performance.[3]
Exasol is a parallelizedrelational database management system (RDBMS) which runs on a cluster of standard computer hardware servers. Following theSPMD model, on each node the identical code is executed simultaneously. The data is stored in a column-oriented way and proprietary in-memory compression methods are used. The company claims that tuning efforts are not necessary since the database includes some kind of automatic self-optimization (like automatic indices, table statistics, and distributing of data).[1][4]
Exasol is designed to runin memory, although data is persistently stored on disk following theACID rules. Exasol supports theSQL Standard 2003 via interfaces likeODBC,JDBC orADO.NET. Asoftware development kit (SDK) is provided for native integration.[4] Foronline analytical processing (OLAP) applications, theMultidimensional Expressions (MDX) extension of SQL is supported viaOLE DB for OLAP andXML for Analysis.[5]
The license model is based on the allocated RAM for the database software (per GB RAM) and independent to the physical hardware. Customers gain the maximal performance if their compressed active data fits into that licensed RAM, but it can also be much larger.
Exasol has implemented a so-called cluster operating system (EXACluster OS). It is based onLinux and provides a runtime environment and storage layer for the RDBMS, employing a proprietary, cluster-based file system (ExaStorage). Cluster management algorithms are provided like failover mechanisms or automatic cluster installation.[1][4]
In-database analytics is supported. Exasol integrates support to runLua,Java,Python andGNU R scripts in parallel insideuser defined functions (UDFs) within the DBMS' SQL pipeline.